Saturday, 26 May 2012

Data roaming, the unexpected cost of Euro 2012

SO now we know which footballers
will be going to represent England at Euro 2012, attention turns to the sort of
experience supporters can expect from the trip.

If I were going to Ukraine (and I’d like to) I’d rather do
it when the place wasn’t filling up with visiting football fans. But we’ll pass
on that.

Overall, I expect the tournament to be quite entertaining,
throw up a few surprises, and for England to do moderately well but not win it.
That’s all par for the course.

There are some distinctly new worries, though, about the
travelling fans. And for once it isn’t tedious old clichés about “English
hooligans” that are filling the airwaves and the column inches.

The expressed concerns seem roughly to break down into three
categories: travel and accommodation, social problems, and technology.

Anyone planning on going to the games really ought to have
sorted out the first category by now.

The biggest problem may lie in the fact that many fans are
expected to base themselves, like the England team, in Poland. Which is rather
a long way from the eastern Ukraine, where two of the three England fixtures so
far confirmed will be played.

In fact, Krakow is the same distance from Donetsk (820
miles) as it is from Ipswich – not a journey to be undertaken unprepared or too
often.

Most supporters won’t have the team’s advantage of a private
plane at their disposal.

That’s why the Ukrainian authorities are thoughtfully
setting up campsites for weary fans, which might be a lot of fun, and then
again…

Once there, the social worry can be summed up in one word:
racism.

Or in one faintly surreal headline (which, as it happens, I
wrote myself): “Donetsk the ‘least racist’ of Euro 2012 host cities”.

Which is perhaps good news (relatively) for England’s black
fans (and players). Though it does occur to me that all the stories about
“racist east Europeans” have themselves got more than a smack of racism about
them.

And technology? This is where it gets seriously surreal.

I’ve just been listening to a long, involved discussion of
what one might have thought was the worst trouble lying in store for those
England followers heading off into the Slavic wilds. Their mobile phone bills
could be huge.

This, apparently, is all to do with Ukraine being outside
the European Union, and therefore not covered by EU-based tariffs.

One sober piece of advice was this: Turn off data searching.

Which sort of makes sense to someone (me) who still accesses
the internet through a computer and uses his phone for making phone calls.

Basically, don’t let your phone connect to the net
automatically without your permission. Because if it decides to go online from
not-very-racist Donetsk, your phone company will sting you.

Another piece of advice, which was offered seriously and
will no doubt be widely ignored, was: Don’t upload lots of video to YouTube and
Facebook.

I might add to that the word “ever”. Because almost all of
it is very, very boring, possibly the greatest waste of time, technology and
server-space yet devised.

Whatever japes you get up to in that campsite, or the local
bars, might be fun at the time, but will make tedious viewing.

And for action footage from the stadium, you won’t be able
to compete with the BBC. The people in their armchairs back home will see every
detail of the game much more clearly than you do.

In fact, my advice to travelling fans about their phones
would be this: take it for emergency use, by all means, but use it in
emergencies only.

After all, humankind has managed for nearly all of its
existence without mobile phones. Right up to about Euro 2000 for most of us.

As for data searching, apps and Twitter, I don’t recall them
being an issue at Euro 2008.

And talking of things that won’t be needed at Euro 2012 –
Robert Green, anyone? Andy Carroll? Ashley Young?

Or those things you’ll wish you’d taken. Most obviously,
Peter Crouch. And a proper right-back – Graham Taylor forgot to take one with him to
Euro 92, and look where that got him.

And then there’s the manager. Unless England surpass
expectations (which for once seem modest) under Roy Hodgson, this will forever
be the tournament we’ll look back on and think: I wonder what it would have
been like with Harry in charge?

----

THE future never turns out to be
quite what you expect.

Who would have thought a few years ago that a teenage girl
would cause a national sensation in 2012 by winning a talent contest with her
performing dog?

One of the joys of science fiction written, or filmed, a few
years ago is spotting what they got right, and what they got delightfully
wrong.

The other day I saw, for the first time, The Running Man, an
Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 1987.

Its 2017 setting still looked, in some ways, weirdly
futuristic – though a future in which clothing and hair styles still seemed
oddly stuck in the 1980s.

But its theme of a “reality” TV gameshow, with a powerful
and sinister host whipping up an uncritical audience into dangerous hysteria,
was horribly prescient.